Don’t fill up your life with petty knowing. Leave space for something more mysterious, more beautiful, more profound than you can presently even imagine. The Great Creator has more beauty in store for you than you can even dream is possible at this point in your life... Leave space for the Great Mystery to offer something new and wonderful! Everything is unfolding in beauty; we need only stop holding on to the familiar.
Without doing anything, things can sometimes go more smoothly just because of our peaceful presence. In a small boat when a storm comes, if one person remains solid and calm, others will not panic and the boat is more likely to stay afloat.
When you rest in God, you just go home to yourself like the wave on the water. If the wave continues to search, she will never find the water. The only way to find the water is to go home to herself. When she realizes that she is water, she has peace. She practices resting in God in the here and the now. Although she continues to rise and fall, she is peaceful. We can practice Love as the ground of our being: Home.
Wisdom is a living stream, not an icon preserved in a museum. Only when we find the spring of wisdom in our own life can it flow to future generations.
Enlightenment, peace, and joy will not be granted by someone else. The well is within us, and if we dig deeply enough in the present moment, the water will spring forth. We must go back to the present moment in order to be really alive... You will be able to make a breakthrough and discover joy and peace right in the present moment, inside of yourself and all around you.
Walk and touch peace every moment.
Walk and touch happiness every moment.
Each step brings a fresh breeze.
Each step makes a flower bloom under our feet.
Kiss the Earth with your feet.
Print on Earth your love and happiness.
Earth will be safe
When we feel in us enough safety.
~ from CALL ME BY MY TRUE NAMES by Thich Nhat Hanh
BEAUTY can be found in birth and also in dying. If we know how to live, we will also know how to die. Living in beauty means dying in beauty. The deepest way to be alive and the deepest way to die are the same -- doing so in harmony with everyone and everything, in the true spirit of interbeing. The moment we do this, ideas of self and nonself, life and death, vanish, and we experience joy, equanimity and non-fear.
The Heart of Understanding gives us solid ground for making peace with ourselves, for transcending the fear of birth and death, the duality of this and that. In the light of emptiness, everything is everything else, we inter-are, everyone is responsible for everything that happens in life. When you produce peace and happiness in yourself, you begin to realize peace for the whole world. With the smile that you produce in yourself, with the conscious breathing you establish within yourself, you begin to work for peace in the world. To smile is not to smile only for yourself; the world will change because of your smile. When you sit in the silence, if you enjoy even one moment of sitting, if you establish serenity and happiness inside yourself, you provide the world with a solid base of peace. If you do not give yourself peace, how can you share it with others? If you do not begin your peace work with yourself, where will you go to begin it?
~ from THE HEART OF UNDERSTANDING by Thich Nhat Hanh
